(I’ve made a couple edits to this since publishing: mention of abolitionists in the 1860s & the Grimke sisters)
Once during a conversation with my friend Ian about militant leftist politics and US history, he suddenly said to me, “there’s no way you’re happy while knowing all of this stuff.”
I’m not the guy who’s gonna cheerlead for white activists and the rest of this essay probably won’t be very nice. I will never drag anybody for protesting, demonstrating, speaking up, or otherwise using their political voice for the right cause. Honestly, God bless anybody doing anything at this point.
The People’s March in Raleigh—much like our Democratic Governor-elect—was toothless and obedient to power. It was a reflection of white liberals’ plans to “fight back” against the Trump administration. If you think I’m being nit-picky or unfairly judgmental or unwilling to give grace, please know that I’m not the compliment sandwich guy. I don’t baby-talk grown ups.
And if today really was white liberals’ first true “act of resistance” against fascism in this state, we’re fucked.
1. The “troubled history” of North Carolina
North Carolina is one of those “heritage, not hate!” states where bastions of slavery are still celebrated today. Much of Raleigh is still named after Paul C. Cameron, the state's largest ever slaveholder. The Bellamy Mansion still stands in Wilmington as a tourist attraction, complete with intact slave quarters and walls adorned with gushing homages to the Bellamy family’s political legacy. Duke University is named for the tobacco kingpin, slaveowner, and Confederate soldier William H. Duke. This place has always been, and still is, really fucking racist.
The engine of chattel slavery single-handedly drove a booming agricultural economy here, making North Carolina one of the most powerful states in the Confederacy. Its tobacco industry made many a white land-owning family obscenely wealthy. But we all know how that ended, and this is the land of sore losers. The Reconstruction Era was disastrous in most Southern states and North Carolina was no different. The Confederate states’ economies were devastated by the loss of slavery and the Civil War; those aforementioned plantation tycoons installed themselves throughout the rebuilding governments; subsidized projects like railroads became a mess of bribes and fraud to the tune of millions; the ensuing corruption quadrupled states’ taxes and threw more gas on the fires of civil unrest; and many Southern states’ already struggling post-war economies were crippled entirely.
After Reconstruction came many race riots. North Carolina’s most famous is the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, where a failed white supremacist gubernatorial candidate usurped the incumbent progressives with a violent force of 500 white men who set fire to buildings and killed many people. The segregationists used their newly seized political power to implement racist voting laws, giving North Carolina a pivotal role in the birth of Jim Crow.
In its more modern form, North Carolina is a “right to work” state with a virtually non-existent union presence. In 1979, the police colluded with the Klan and Neo-Nazis to slaughter marching labor organizers in the Greensboro Massacre. Durham was one of the most prosperous black-owned economies in the country until desegregation allowed white investors to cripple black businesses by buying up and “revitalizing” (demolishing) swaths of property. The consequences of redlining and other discriminatory zoning practices are starkly visible.
In Raleigh, Durham and Cary, the explosion of the “Research Triangle” in recent years has skyrocketed housing prices and displaced thousands of residents from their homes, having been replaced by white people flocking here for high-paying jobs in tech and pharmaceuticals. Sparkly modern apartment buildings pop up around universities and office buildings while those outside the city center have fallen into disrepair; tenants live with mold and roaches and code violations as their absentee landlords continue to raise rent. Many of those tenants are Latin American immigrants who are targeted by intimidation and legalese written in a language they don’t speak.
North Carolina (and Raleigh in particular) is a blunt example of class divisions and the racial lines seared into them. The effects of modern day segregation are impossible to deny: track homes being built in the thousands are bought up by whites, while poor neighborhoods, homeless shelters and prisons are overwhelmingly black. Yes, Raleigh’s booming white-collar industries and prestigious universities do attract a bluer-than-average constituency, but they’re NIMBYs; the type of (white) liberals who opposed the Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier because “it would ruin the aesthetic of the bridge;” the type who police others’ exclusionary language on Twitter but lock their own car doors around black people.
2. The White Women’s March
The People’s March was about 200 people who marched for an hour and then went home.
Look, like I said at the beginning, I’m glad they were even there! I am proud of these brave white women for doing the absolute bare minimum and I do feel profound fear for the women in my community who risk losing their reproductive rights. I know that interspersed throughout the crowd were activists and organizers and folks who faithfully hit every demonstration. I know that the reason women even find themselves in this position is the institutional misogyny of American politics, and I don’t mean to dismiss that by commentating on this stuff. I shouldn’t need to clarify my politics on this, but I feel like I ought to because of everything I’m about to say.
I’ve made my thoughts on white activism no secret, but frankly we’re entering an era where white liberals no longer have the choice to abstain from violence, whether they understand that or not. I get nervous every time there’s a demonstration here anyway—we’re only a few hours away and eight years removed from the Unite The Right rally, North Carolina has a practically invisible militant leftist presence, and police crackdowns on last year’s campus protests in support of Palestine were vicious—so I came prepared: backpack full of first aid stuff, hospital routes in mind, pepper spray on my belt, and all my tattoos covered. The RSVP list online was nearly a thousand people, and while I knew that was pretty inflated and it was raining to boot, I expected a lot of people.
I was parked close to the property and I felt confident that even from the far side of the block, I could get to the carbine in my car in less than a minute. I don’t care if you think I’m being dramatic, because congregations of unarmed worshippers and demonstrators are like catnip to hogs who want to shoot people.
Not only did I not need a damn thing, I felt like I was back in high school at a soccer game (exactly how I felt watching Montana’s version of the 2020 BLM protests). Every time a car honked, an enthusiastic (white) falsetto chorus of “Wooo!” erupted from the marchers. Clusters of (white) women stepped into the grass to take group selfies. At 12:15 an organizer stood on the corner and reminded everyone, “we’re protesting til 12:30! Keep it up!” More cheering. Fifteen more minutes, you can do this! You’re doing great, ladies!
Is this a political protest in the dying gasps of bodily autonomy, or a spin class?
At 12:30 it was over. The organizer said through a megaphone: “Great job everybody, let’s keep that energy for the next four years!” A final chorus of cheers was let out, the last round of group pictures were taken, and—I swear to god—the entire place cleared out in less than five minutes.
That was their big show of force: an hour and change of marching, cheering for passing cars, many selfies, and promptly leaving the moment they were told to do so. Don’t obey in advance, right? Timothy Snyder would be proud, I’m sure. That’s as hard as liberals have ever had to fight for anything, and to quote that organizer, they “brought that same energy!”
Aside from a couple ACLU volunteers and demonstrators, it was all white people, and the reason the first part of this essay is about North Carolina’s racial climate is specifically to give context to this point. The violence of misogyny is intersectional and I don’t mean to sound reductive to the white women who experience it. I do, however, want to stress that white women are the last ones with any reproductive rights to lose, and that’s why they’re out there alone.
Restrictions on reproductive rights have always targeted black women. During the 18-19th centuries, black women’s reproductive choices were severely restricted as a way to ensure the birth of more slaves, and federal law protected whites’ right to own not just black women, but their children and “future descendants.” James Marion Sims, “the father of modern gynecology,” used enslaved black women for his experiments which he practiced without anesthesia.
Then, when slavery was abolished, the focus on restricting black women’s reproductive rights inverted, hard switching from forced procreation to sterilization and eugenics. North Carolina in particular was at the forefront of this treachery, as explained by Paola Alonso in Autonomy Revoked: The Forced Sterilization of Women of Color in 20th Century America
African American women were one of the most targeted populations for forced sterilizations in the twentieth century, especially in the state of North Carolina. North Carolina was among one of the first states to include reproductive technology into its public health and welfare programs and had one of the most active state sterilization programs. North Carolina was also one of the first states to enact a voluntary sterilization law in 1960. These laws provided the state with the ability to sterilize those who were perceived as feeble-minded, with African American welfare recipients being one of the groups coerced into sterilization on this basis. The percentage of African American state-sterilized patients in North Carolina increased tremendously throughout the twentieth century, from 23% in the 1930s-1940s, to 59% between 1958 and 1960, and then 64% between 1964 and 1966.
This racial meddling in women’s rights isn’t some long-past chapter of history—there weren’t even laws on the books requiring doctors to perform abortions regardless of race until 2011. Today, black women are at three times the risk of death from ectopic pregnancy as white women; three times the overall mortality rate during childbirth as white women; twice the rates of infant mortality as white women.
To reference my friend’s quip about how I “can’t be happy knowing all of this,” no, I can’t. I see a bunch of white women marching around the capital, “fighting” for their rights with a 90 minute protest and spending half the time on photo ops, and I get pissed off. Sue me.
I am often found on TikTok urging white leftists to study the organizing tactics of black revolutionaries. Inevitably a black person with some sense will comment something to the tune of “you guys are on your own, don’t ask us for shit,” and white people get their feelings really hurt. They launch into mortifying, out-of-touch tirades about class solidarity; they lecture the aforementioned black commenter on what being an ally means; they are shocked and appalled that all races can’t come together and hold hands to fight for change.
Here’s the thing: white women as a whole have never fought for black women. That’s not to say there haven’t been efforts throughout history; of course there were. Activists like the Grimke sisters—two Quaker women who were radical even by abolitionist standards, and whom my own Quaker grandparents taught us about as kids—fought for the liberation of black women in the Antebellum South until their deaths. But the numbers don’t lie: Democrats haven’t won the white vote since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. White women by and large haven’t been wont to fight for anyone’s rights but their own. It has always been, overwhelmingly, black women who fought and died to legislate some humanity into this country’s barbarically racist approach to reproductive rights. That “your body my choice” shit overwhelmingly affects black women. They get killed six times more often than white women, and suffer sexual violence at a rate higher than any other race in the country.
With regard to the 2024 election, slightly less than half of American women still voted for Trump, who nakedly advertised his plans to strip repro rights throughout his campaign. 86% of black constituents voted blue, but only half of white voters could muster it, and now we’re here. So no, black women aren’t gonna come to your march.
What I saw today was my first taste of white liberal rebellion; non-white communities who’ve been shit on for centuries by whites have told us we’re on our own, and today was the white effort.
As valiantly as the People fought for an hour and a half today, North Carolina’s state government and Trump’s administration will try to unilaterally take away women’s reproductive rights next week. If today was what they’ve got coming to them for it, I just don’t know what to say. It broke my heart, honestly. It felt performative. This fight isn’t for white people, it’s for everybody, with stakes that have never been higher. The last couple months of watching white people suddenly wake up, realize they need to fight, and then see what they think that means, has been an exercise in abject masochism.
Is Trump really Hitler? Is this the end of democracy? Are you gonna really move to Canada? And if the stakes are that high, why is this what the fight to stop it looks like?
I think the worst part is that I know people here will justify it. “This is North Carolina dude.” I know, and I don’t accept that. This state’s pathetic and disgusting history isn’t an excuse to settle for more of it. Today wasn’t good enough. White liberals are gonna get all of us fucking killed.
i went to the 2016 women’s march in dc and didn’t go to the peoples marches this time bc i knew it would be more of the same performative bs. cooperating w police and not standing w marginalized folks is not appealing. i know real protesting can be powerful, but tbh im tired of the performative shit rn. it feels like a parade rather than a form of true protes. it’s time to take action.
Solid take, I have witnessed and been a part of many a performative protest, and it always leaves a bad taste in my mouth.